And so as a cook he sailed away for fever-stricken Surinam, or Dutch Guiana. His wages, together with some presents from the officers, enabled him to bring back a private “adventure” of a barrel of molasses and some dried fruit. The trade with the West Indies had flourished a full century before the Revolution. There was always a market for salted codfish to feed the slaves of the sugar plantations. The return cargoes were largely molasses for distilling New England rum. These voyages had been extended to the mainland of South America; to Surinam, where fish and lumber were exchanged for the products of the Dutch East Indies; to Honduras, whose logwood and mahogany were cut for export to England. Young Elijah Cobb escaped the swamp fever and returned with twenty silver dollars to put into his mother’s hands, “probably, the largest sum of money she had possess^{d.} since she had been a widow--& that, from her poor little sick Boy.” No wonder her tears flowed freely, upon the occasion. For some time thereafter he was sailing coastwise and working his way up to a mate’s berth. Then he crossed the stormy Western Ocean and felt qualified for command. He must have been twenty-three years old when he became master of a brig. This was not unusually youthful. Nathaniel Silsbee of Salem, a captain in the East India trade at nineteen, could say of his own family: “Connected with the seafaring life of myself and my brothers, there were some circumstances which do not usually occur in one family. In the first place each of us commenced that occupation in the capacity of clerk, or supercargo, myself at the age of fourteen years; my brother William at about fifteen; and my brother Zachariah at about sixteen and a half years. Each and all of us obtained the command of vessels and the consignment of their cargoes before attaining the age of twenty years, viz., myself at the age of eighteen and a half, my brother William at nineteen and a half, and my brother Zachariah before he was twenty years old.” It was during his first voyage to Europe as a shipmaster that Captain Elijah Cobb showed himself to be a young man of exceptional courage and contrivance. Steering for Cadiz, he learned that it was unsafe to venture too close to Gibraltar and so he changed his course to Coruna in the Bay of Biscay. The swift corsairs of the Dey of Algiers were cruising like wolves to snap up merchantmen and enslave their Christian crews. In his journal Captain Cobb states that “the Algerines were at war with America.” This is not quite accurate, for the United States delayed declaring war on the Barbary pirates until 1801, several years after this.